I’m kinda iffy on this idea that students can’t be poor because they will get jobs later.
I have no money. No seriously, I have no money. I can’t post date a check by four years, people. Yes, eventually I will have money. Eventually is a pretty key word. Future earnings do not translate to current cash flow, as much as I would like them to. Students can be poor, students for the most part, are poor. I’m sorry but if you are living on ramen and not real sure how you’re going to pay rent this month you are poor, if you’re 22 and a Chem major or 22 with 4 kids and on welfare. Poor is poor. Its a state, and the chances of it changing with time don’t magically make it disappear.
Beyond that, Finagle, you say that child care should be paid for, but not birth control? So she should just get pregnant and not worry about a thing. And free condoms? Not that I know of, and I prefer to have a back up method that I’m in charge of. I like to take responciblity for my actions, sexual and otherwise. I believe that doing so is the mark of a decent person, and I really don’t understand where any of you are getting off saying she should be less personally responcible. We won’t talk about asking her sex partner(s) to handle the expence, it gets pretty darn demeaning at that stage. (Hey honey, I’d love to but I need fifty bucks to pay for my shot. No money, no nookie.)
All in all, there should be an intermediate jump between $5 (the “poor” price) and $58. Or a way to say “I’ll pay $5 now and donate the rest when I have that nice job everyone thinks I have now.” Luckily, my school’s health services have a pretty decent subsidy, I think I paid $24 a shot for Depo.
What is this ‘Depo’ of which you speak? ‘Depo’ is also steroid-slang for testosterone-ciponate, which makes one big and beefy. I am guessing that PP ‘Depo’ is something else?
Medea, a poor college student is different than a poor person out in the world. College students have made a choice to be there, living a (sometimes) difficult life for their future benefit. The average poor person hasn’t made that choice, they are just missing the skills, education, whatever to get a good job.
Certainly some students are poorer than others, Melandry, IMHO, doesn’t quite fit the bill for a poor student since she’s making a go at her education without widely available student loans. Even poor students (usually) have options, until they exercise those options, I will hold them apart from “true” poor people.
I’ll give you this, though, if you’re doing everything you can to be financially sound, and are still scraping change together to pay for dinner, student or not, you’re poor, and deserve the aid of agencies like PP.
Melandry, one reason poor people can get cheap medical care from Planned Parenthood is that people like me donate money to them. I’m not complaining. I donate because I want birth control and abortions to be available. Even more importantly, many employees of PP work there because of their beliefs, not because it’s the best job they can get.
So, many cllients of PP are receiving gifts. Somehow the organizaton through an institution makes it harder to see them as gifts. In short, you might conisider an attitude of being grateful to the full-time PP staff and to the whole organization.
Yeah, I seem to remember being a TA and working in a damn auto factory in Iowa City (United Technologies Automotive!) during my downtrodden grad school days.
I’m sorry to say but, if you’re getting a full ride through grad school and getting some cash you’re not in a great position to complain. You think maybe that free ride isn’t income? What’s the value of it in dollars? Do you pay federal and state taxes on it?
Jonathan “Paid for every penny of his grad school in cash” Chance
Count me among those who say that you’ve got no ground to stand on. You’re whining. If sex isn’t worth 61 cents a day to you, then try celibacy. Not only does it eliminate the need for contraceptives, I’ve heard that it can bring about mental and spiritual renewal, which may help you gain a little perspective on why you aren’t the equivalent of the genuinely impoverished women who receive the highly subsidized Depo you crave.
I don’t pay taxes on the full ride element of my fellowship, and I am expressly forbidden by the terms of my fellowship from taking an outside job. If I do so and my department finds out, I lose my fellowship.
Maybe we could just let this thread die now as I am of one opinion about my financial status, and that of students in general, and apparentally the majority disagrees with that. I’ve been hit over the head with the opinion that I am not poor, but rather a spoiled bitch, enough now, and although I realize pleas of this sort generally do not get respected, but rather lead to more people needing to tell me just how wrong I am, I would really appreciate it if we could speak no more of it. I’ve listened to your opinions, hard as they are for me to accept, I’m certainly not going to lie to get the cheaper Depo, and I shall not whine about it again in the future.
Well, that’s dangerously close to saying one can still post to the thread as long as I don’t take offense at what you say, which is a no-no. But no one says you have to respect my wish to have this thread die quietly, anyway.
I musta missed soemthing here- Isn’t this thread about pp charging more for students because they are students? or that they can get money from their parents? Thats what I got out of it, what does this have to do with a ta’s income? When I went to pp I was making about 13,000 and my bc only cost 8.50.
It’s not exactly about pp charging students more. It’s about pp (that particular one, anyway) disqualifying students from their sliding scale fee schedule. So that the OP, with her $13,000/year income would have had to pay full price ($56) for the shot, rather than the $5 a non-student with the same income would have been charged.
** Melandry**
I don’t claim to know your financial position, and no one else here knows it either.(Nor do you know the position of students in general-nearly everyone I know who went to grad school full-time received some support from their parents. Doesn’t mean they all do, or even most, but the fact that the grad students you know don’t get help doesn’t mean they represent students in general either) But you have to understand, poverty is relative and pp has to set limits on who they will subsidize. When I was a grad student, I only earned about $13,000/year (for the whole year). I would have been eligible for the sliding scale at pp because I never would have listed my occupation as student. I wouldn’t have listed my occupation as student because I spent about 9 hours a week in class and 40 hours at the job I needed to pay my tuition. I would have traded paying a couple of hundred dollars a year in birth control costs for a free ride and a TA position in a heartbeat.
I don’t think you’re a spoiled bitch.I just think you’re looking at this from the perspective of “If I wasn’t a student and I had the same income, I’d be paying $5” while not accounting for the facts that
Planned Parenthood has a limited budget, and cannot do a detailed financial investigation on every student who comes in. I’d bet they ask for no more than a tax return (if they even ask for that). I’d also bet that lots of students who show minimal wages have parents or loans covering a good part of their expenses.
-You have options that a non-student making 13,000 doesn’t have. Sure, you wouldn’t be eligible for much in student loans. But you could get something. And as best as I remember, payments are deferred while you’re a full-time student. A non-student making $13,000 a year probably couldn’t get a loan, and even if he or she could, the chances are not great that the financial circumstances would improve so quickly that paying the loan back with interest wouldn’t cause problems.
-Your full-ride is in itself a much greater subsidy than a $5 shot would be. Which is probably the part that caused the reaction you got. You’re not only in a better financial position than non-students who earn $13,000, you’re in a better position (long-term) than other students who earn $13,000 and have to come up with a way to pay their tuition.
Not quite what I said. Someone with kids who wants to go back to school and get a degree, or a grad degree to improve their income? Heck yeah, they need and deserve child support. And school just won’t happen if that kind of societal support isn’t provided. But you must have missed the part of my post where I opined that sex is not a necessary part of the collegiate experience.
Sure, sex is fun. Should Planned Parenthood supply cheap birth control to students? I could argue, I think with equal justification, that there should be an organization that supplies cheap Red Sox tickets to poor students.
Let me join the mini-pile by saying get a fucking job! So you teach a couple classes. Get a fucking job like the rest of us struggling to get thru school do. You may have a huge brain and that is why you have your ENTIRE tuition paid for, and NO loans from your undergrad time, but fuck, to bitch about some damn birth control shit when you are getting a free ride thru school is pretty weak.
-Stinkpalm $35k in student loans and climbing, also full time engineer-
In a lot of cities, there are programs that actually do this–supply cheap sporting events tickets to students (all students, though, not just poor ones.) Here in Pittsburgh, we have the “student rush program,” which gives out great cheap seats for the Penguins.
I’d like to be a little nicer about my recommendation than some other people.
First, $56 is a subsidized, discounted rate for Depo. I’ve been on it 8 years and have never paid less than $50. Right now, I’m at a rate of $60/shot.
Second, you’re looking at a PLANNED expense of less than $240 per year. You said you work summers and whatnot because your stipend only pays 8 months out of the year. Any reason you can’t set aside $250 from your summer job and budget that out for your four shots a year? BF can’t kick in once in a while?
Point being: I think you can subsidize yourself, which is probably why PP doesn’t discount students. You’re supposed to be more resourceful than the disadvantaged poor. Take a second job. Heck, if you worked at McDonald’s for $7/hour, you’d only have to work 33 hours – say 10 hours a week for three weeks, and your Depo is paid for for the year. (Calculated at 7.50 per hour to account for taxes.)
Use your smart grad school brain, pool your resources. You’ll think of something.
Just out of plain curiosity (and you certainly don’t have to answer me if you odn’t want because there could be medical/personal reasons you don’t feel like getting into) why are you using Depo? There are several forms of birth control that are not nearly as expensive. I mean, I only pay $60 for a whole year’s worth of pills.